The Trust Problem. Some people and some countries have it. Some don't. Why?

Whom do you trust? In a society, less
trust =
more laws. Signals of trust change between cultures, and even social
class. In
some countries public trust is almost zero. Also, can a “Facebook
friend” or a
face from TV be really trusted? An Internet romance? For some, religion
signals
trustworthiness. What is your solution for building trust in a
complicated
world?

Thor May

Adelaide, 2016

This page is an initial starter list for
discussing the "Trust " topic. The page makes no
special claim to quality, and additions are welcome.

Once a very good lion was king of all the animals in the fields and the forests.

He was not angry or cruel or unfair, but only kind and gentle.

During his reign he made a royal proclamation to all the animals.

He laid out rules for a Universal League of animals.

In this League, the wolf would not harm the lamb, nor would the panther harm the kid.

The tiger would not hurt the deer, and the dog would not hurt the hare.

Everyone should live in perfect peace and friendship.

When the hare saw this proclamation, she said, "Oh how I have waited for this day.

How wonderful it is that the weak will stand alongside the strong without fear."

After she said this, the hare ran away for her life.

Comments on
the topic by Thor:

a.
Introduction

New Zealand, when
I lived there in the 1960s and 1970s, had the highest level of public trust
that I’ve known. China, when I lived there (1998-2000 and 2007-2010) seemed to
have almost no public trust. Life is so much less complicated and more
efficient when the level of trust is high: a great deal can be taken for
granted, so-called security concerns are minimal. My impression is that
Australian public and private life has been trending towards the wrong end of
the trust index for quite a while. These notes are an exploration of some of
the factors involved.

One way to begin
teasing out what is involved in trust is to draw up a little table of sample
situations and role types, indicating your trust comfort level with them, and
also how you guess average others might rate them (i.e. are you just being
paranoid?
This is a very approximate exercise, but it sets some navigation
beacons). If the trust index is trending in the wrong direction the big
issue of course is how to turn it around, both at a personal level, and
at the level of the wider society.

Examples on a
scale of 1-5, with average others in brackets. 5 = highest trust :

Situation
or role

Trust what?

You

Others

consult a doctor

doctor’s competence

2

5

buying on the
Internet

getting what
you pay for

3-4

3

submitting
a CV

expect that
the CV will be trusted

2

4

asking help
from a stranger

expect that
the stranger will judge you to be genuine

3

2

Be seen as a trustworthy person

Do most people trust your general
intentions?

3

4

Ask for advice from Centrelink

Do you trust the advice given
to you by Centrelink staff?

2

2

Walk anywhere at night

Do you trust that you will be safe walking at night

4

2

Get help from the police

Do you trust that the police
will treat you competently and fairly?

3

4

Qualifications 1.

Do you trust other’s qualifications
as an indication of competence?

2

4

Qualifications 2.

Do you trust other’s qualifications
as an indication of useful learning

2

4

This list could obviously go on forever, and will
be constantly modified by individual situations. However, it is probably true that
we do have a default mindset for the trust index which will influence the way we
approach other people. Similarly, there is probably a default mindset in certain
groups of people which influences how they see themselves in the community (my guesses
above have no foundation in research at all). In fact, we know these mindsets exist
because of the existence of political constituencies (e.g. the people who are drawn
to Donald Trump in the United States). Keeping track of such scores may be more
witchcraft than science.

b.
Starter questions

1. What does
it really mean to be “a trusting
person”? Are you a trusting person?

“A trusting person”, at least in my culture, is
a paradoxical phrase. On the one hand it might be a slightly sarcastic comment
about someone who is a bit naïve and who perhaps has fallen for an obvious scam
like a Nigerian romance e-mail. On the other hand it might refer to the
character of a person in a complimentary way, a generous personality who is
open enough to give anyone the benefit of the doubt until they prove themselves
unworthy of such trust. Context then is important. We all know people who are
quite open and accepting, as well as others who are closed and suspicious,
sometimes to the point of paranoia. It is a matter of personal judgement,
partly drawn from life experience, where we place ourselves. This may be
influenced by our roles, and usually also by the culture within which we find ourselves.
Are you a trusting person?

2. What do
you react to when you are deciding to trust or not trust a person?

What people find trustworthy varies
tremendously, and often we are not very good judges. After all, about half of
marriages fail. Biology plays a part. We automatically respond to faces, yet in
the factory where babies are made we don’t get to choose our own face. If you
were unlucky enough to be born with a certain kind of face you might face a
lifelong struggle to secure the trust of others, especially in situations where
the encounter if brief, such as selling or job interviews.

Some people are impressed by styles of
dressing, or obvious wealth. One investment bank in England recently admitted
that it failed job candidates who wore brown shoes because their customers
judged brown shoe wearers to be less trustworthy. Others are contemptuous of ‘suits’
(a person wearing a suit) and automatically regard them with distrust.

On the whole people are more trusting of
individuals who fit into a familiar cultural role and type. That is, they
believe they know what to expect. Sometimes those roles are occupational, such
as doctor. For some people, cultural
expectations are rigidly defined by skin colour, ethnicity, nationality, religion etc.
and they are reluctant to extend trust to those beyond their own circle.

In our daily lives, as we come to know
particular individuals we will calibrate our trust of them based on past
experience. Children normally have great trust in their parents, at least until
their teenage years. If we know somebody from a work environment we will trust
or not trust their behaviour in that context, while having little idea of their
private life.

Of course, the word ‘trust’ itself is very
situational. How far you trust a person will depend upon what you are asking
them to do. If I know from past experience that a man is a good mechanic I will
be happy to entrust my car to him, but might not even consider taking him into
my trust to assist with a personal crisis. A manager might trust a simple
fellow to pick up the mail, but know that the same fellow could not conceivably
be trusted to understand and make complex business decisions. Conversely, less
complicated individuals are apt to regard clever people with a good deal of
distrust (and dislike) since they may not be able to predict what these clever
people will do.

The hardest trust choices are those about
individuals where the consequences of trust are extremely unclear. A simple
example is trusting call centre workers to rectify a complaint when you are not
sure if the call center worker either understands or cares about the issue, and
their identity vanishes with the end of a phone call (I have learned to always
ask for an ID number).

A much more difficult environment of unknown
consequences occurs with online dating and romance sites where the potential
for emotional and financial damage is quite large. Intimate personal
relationships, let alone a commitment to marriage, are always a gamble. Taken to
the virtual level of the Internet, real life commitments without live,
in-person encounters, are a significant area of criminal activity. Yet
regardless of risk, millions of people do extend that trust daily, and a
proportion lose badly. (Police report that in Australia about 70% people who
are warned when they are at risk of
particular online romance scams disbelieve the police and go on to lose
their money). On the upside, some
studies have shown that most people engaged in an online hunt for “the one” are
in fact genuine and tell the truth about themselves, more or less (e.g. Seidman 2014)

In various employment
situations it is not uncommon for younger employees to be quietly tested in
various ways to see if they can be trusted to be discreet, have good judgement,
and so on. Occasionally the “testers” disqualify themselves. In 1964 I joined
the Australian Commonwealth Public Service in Brisbane before being posted to
Canberra. No doubt as part of the decision about what to do with me, an office
manager took a Browning .32 calibre pistol out of his draw, handed it to me and
asked me to walk each week around Brisbane two paces behind an older man
carrying a cash payroll in his briefcase. My enquiries about weapons training
were brushed off, and when I persisted with asking about when and where I would
have personal liability for causing injury in any attempted robbery the manager
was visibly annoyed. I was posted to Canberra in a mind-bending dead-end
clerical office. I had failed their implicit do-or-die challenge test. They had
also failed my test, giving a deadly weapon with no training to a 17 year old kid,
and evading responsibility. I left. I’ve
had a diminished trust in bureaucracies ever since.

3. What
situations do you trust yourself to handle well, and where do you not trust
yourself? Why? How has this changed over time?

Perhaps the most important part of coming to
maturity is learning your own limitations, learning to deal with them as is,
and learning to overcome them. It is often a painful process, and in some
matters we never know how far to trust ourselves until a crisis arrives. The
poor judgement and disregard of consequences shown by many young people up to
their mid twenties (not fully developed frontal lobes, in physiological terms),
may even have evolutionary advantages. They trust their abilities where trust
is not justified, and plunge into situations of high risk, no matter whether
that is romance or a war or a job or robbing a bank. Sometimes they crash and
burn. Sometimes they survive, sadder but wiser about trust. Personally I regret
not having taken more risks in that age of innocence (maybe I was never
innocent enough). The costs may have been higher, but perhaps also the rewards.

With age and experience comes a degree of
self-knowledge, at least for some people, and with that comes self-trust in
what they can manage both technically and interpersonally. I can happily stand
in front of a hundred people to speak, a
challenge that would have been way beyond my confidence at 19, yet have never
learned to be really at ease in intimate dialogue. Also, reflecting on past
regrets, there have been times when I lost my temper briefly, and would like to
think such losses of grace are past (but the self-trust in self-control is not
quite there if provoked).

The hero’s tale: It is remarkable how a hero
of the school football team will transform into a timid company employee,
castrated by the fear of losing a mortgage, a wife and a child. We would all
like to be a hero in our own movie, but without a certain chutzpah such
narratives are rarely trusted by others, or even ourselves. Real tests of
character or skill, when they come, are often not anticipated. For example, I
am definitely not the derring-do hero type, yet once as a young man broke up a
knife fight without stopping to reflect, and got away with it. (An hour later I
was shaking like a leaf, imagining what might have happened). I would never
trust myself to run that script again. Still, one can’t be sure until the
moment comes.

People often do trust in reputation,
including their own, even if it has been manufactured by a PR agency (the
propagandist is usually his own first victim). With public figures, especially
politicians, as the years pass and the flip-flops of declared belief multiply,
it can come to a point where nobody including central actor any longer knows who
“the real” person is. For example, a figure like Hillary Clinton, current US
presidential candidate, has mutated so many times over 40 years that she is
almost universally distrusted on both sides of politics, yet it is not beyond
possibility that she could emerge as a
genuinely transformative figure (in a way that it is almost impossible to
imagine her opponent, Donald Trump, doing).

Rehearsed role plays have a way of coming
undone. In every occupation the players rehearse for their roles. Much
schooling is about just that, not to speak of peer pressure, media propaganda,
and all the rest. Those who are pumped up with all this stuff, but still
untested, may have absolute trust in their own abilities and own rectitude.
People around them may share the trust, and whole careers can pass without serious
challenge to such structures of trust and confidence. On the other hand, brutal
tests may come too. It is the new army recruit who is overconfident, and the veteran
returning from three tours of duty in Afghanistan + PTSD who is likely to have learned
the limits of trust and self-trust. What goes for individuals sadly can go for whole
nations too. Patriotism/nationalism too often become trusted vehicles for a community’s
identity, vehicles which are inevitably betrayed. I have been in countries where
a shrieking mob can be aroused to defend the imagined honour of a country (countries
are imaginary realms), yet fellow citizens are left to die in the streets.

4. Which
occupational groups do you trust the most, and which the least? What do you
actually mean when you say that, for example, you trust a doctor?

5. In most
learning situations we have to take a great deal on trust (e.g. I can’t easily
test the melting point of steel personally). That is we agree to trust some
kind of authority. What are some downsides of trusting authority?

It can’t be an accident that in the iconic
Christian origin myth about the Garden of Eden, the first significant act was
betraying the trust of authority, in that case Yawei, the god, who proceeded to
punish the betrayal of his/her trust with mankind’s demotion to mere mortality.
This kind of story is repeated often in the world’s compendium of myth. Most of
mankind seems to have heeded the lesson because trust in authority has been a
default attitude in most places, with the occasional rebel suffering heavy
punishment. This kind of trust is often called faith, and for daily
living is a useful rule of thumb, a kind of economy which saves on worrying
about big unanswerable questions, so that there is time left over to do the
grocery shopping and wash the car.

The trouble with trust in authority is that
authority so often betrays the trust, or proves not equal to promises. If
politics is the art of the possible, its practice inevitably means that
somebody’s trust has to be betrayed. But politicians are merely the used car
salesmen of governance. We live in an era where trust in whatever we learned at
school is likely to become obsolete within a decade. The trust/faith we have in
everything from the latest line of medicines to the capacity of computer memory
chips, to whether any ‘expert’ really knows what he is talking about … all of this
kaleidoscope of types of faith/trust, we
must somehow use to efficiently navigate the modern world. Everything is conditional. To survive into the
future we are forced to place bets on the truth of every kind of knowledge and the
usefulness of every kind of artifact, yet somehow remain unsurprised when our bets
fail again and again. There is a certain resilience needed to maintain a working
level of trust/faith, while retaining the independence to junk whatever doesn’t
work out. Not everyone can handle it, and the responses to having faith/trust challenged
are richly reflected in turbulent politics.

6. Securing
trust in unequal situations

Trust
between equals is fairly easy. Trust
is far more difficult where one person or organization or country has
some kind
of power in greater measure than the other. All cultures have rules to
ensure
that the trust of children is not abused, and there is a biological
drive to be
protective as well since this is related to the survival of the
species.
However, clearly all adults are not equal in their talents or
abilities, but
this situation is so variable that there is wide disagreement about the
obligations of the more gifted, or more knowledgeable or more
fortunate, and
accordingly trust between these parties is often absent. Where cultural
rules themselves are changing rapidly, trust is even more difficult to
secure. For example this seems to be the present case in gender
relationships.

On a personal level, I have found the trust
<->talent equation quite difficult to handle for much of my life - not my
trust in others, but their trust in me. Let’s take a couple of basic matters:
maths & language (as in literacy) ability. My underlying aptitude for maths
seems to be so-so. I can get by in an average sort of way, but that’s about it.
Socially this is quite a comfortable position to be in, except in the company
of mathematicians. They can pity me without risk, and normally I would have
little reason to resent them. However when it comes to the symbolic games of
natural language and literacy I know without false modesty that I’m up at the
very top of the tree. After decades of unexpected resentment from unexpected
quarters I’ve come to understand that this is a rather lonely place to be.

Stuff that I have written, or decoded from
complex texts, and assumed that my understanding of it was more or less
equivalent to the understanding of everyone else, has frequently turned out to
be a barrier instead. The barrier to understanding easily becomes a barrier to
trust. It is known that almost half the population of even so-called advanced
countries cannot read the instructions on grocery or pharmaceutical items.
Their struggle is called functional illiteracy. As with maths, there is no
magical cut-off point. It is a curve of increasing difficulty for different
people. By far the largest part of every human population avoids reading
anything that looks “hard” them. With that in mind, when I came to write a doctoral
dissertation, I wrote it in the simplest language possible that was consistent with
not degrading to treatment of the topic; (this made a couple of examiners uneasy,
their cherished status affronted).

The bottom line is that many people have
trouble liking a person who is either smarter or more knowledgeable than them
in some respect. That is, they can’t trust or like what they don’t understand
unless it carries an official stamp of “authority”. One of the worst insults in
Australian culture is to be called “a know-all”. In a world of increasing specialization
and complexity, the social barriers of trust created by unequal knowledge is fragmenting
every culture. What are your effective ways of breaking down this kind of
barrier?

7. Clearly
our decisions to trust or not trust are influenced by age and experience
(although there are old fools as well as young fools). It is notoriously
difficult to warn the young against rash actions (e.g. sexting naked selfies to a romance interest
of the moment, as 30% of 14 year olds now apparently do). Should we even try to
warn them?

8. There is
such a thing as general social trust. For 93 years my mother refused to lock
the front door, or any door of her house. She grew up in a village where
locking doors would be offensive to the community, but lived her adult life in
a city. Now I live in a house with double locks on the doors and internal
electronic movement sensors. I feel more imprisoned than safer. How do we
arrive at a sensible balance of social trust with the communities we live in?

9. Does the
ever-growing list of laws improve our sense of social trust, or is it a symptom
of a breakdown in trust?

10. In
industry, and in school curriculums, there are now detailed lists of
“compliance points”. Once the boxes have been ticked, further judgement is
apparently not needed. Can these kinds of performance indicators really be
trusted? Think of examples.

11. As a
child I used to read a comic about a London policeman called PC49. He carried a
baton, but otherwise was never armed. He was respected and trusted however.
London police were not armed at that time, not that there were fewer criminals.
Now police worldwide carry multiple weapons (following TV fashion) and
regularly get into fire-fights. Has the police arms race led to an increase in
trust?

12. Billions
of individuals now migrate mentally for hours every day into electronic media. Many
of the other people they seem to interact with are actually electronic images,
perhaps never met in the flesh. The trend is accelerating. These electronic
partnerships involve much of what passed for normal physical life previously. Jobs
are performed, money is made and lost, friendships, enmities and even lovers
come and go. The personal reach of electronic partnerships is often
planet-wide, yet the subtle cues that led us to trust or not trust are often
missing now. What would you put in a guidebook for establishing trust in the
age of the internet and smart phone?

13. When I
was born in 1945, 97% of Australians came from similar cultural origins,
originally Anglo-Celtic. We might not have liked the unspoken social rules
much, but we more or less knew what they were, and therefore what and whom to
trust. Now over 200 cultures of origin are found in Australia, drawing on every
conceivable kind of social tradition. How can we navigate trust in such a fluid
cultural environment?

14. In many countries
of the world, public trust of any kind is very hard to find. The agents of governments
are oppressive, corrupt or violent. The rule of law hardly exists. Doing anything
beyond family connections can become hugely complicated and time consuming, requiring
favours given or received and multiple bribes, even for things like basic health
care. History tells us that violent revolution never changes any of this. What is
the most effective mechanism for creating communities of trust in places where trust
is almost unknown?

Ortiz-Ospina, Esteban and Max Roser (various
dates) "Trust" [graphical charts of trust within countries. This is a
must-see, but be very careful about the limitations of attitude surveys which
cannot correct for cultural variations in responses to surveys themselves. e.g.
One chart shows the absurd outcome that trust in China is world best, along
with Scandanavian countries]. Our World in Data website online @ https://ourworldindata.org/trust

Wike,
Richard and Kathleen Holzwart (15, 2008) "Where Trust is High, Crime and
Corruption are Low". [be very careful about the limitations of attitude
surveys which cannot correct to cultural variations in responses to surveys
themselves. e.g. One chart shows the absurd outcome that trust in China is world
best, along with Scandanavian countries]. Our World in Data website online @https://ourworldindata.org/trust

Wikiprogress (n.d.) "Trust".
[Recommended. This is one of the best summaries of academic studies of trust]
Wikiprogress online @http://wikiprogress.org/articles/society-and-culture/trust/
Yates, Reggie (4 May
2015) "Reggie Yates visits Siberia to meet the young girls who are going
to extreme lengths to attract the international scouts and make it as fashion
models in the West". [a rather intriguing account of an extreme dilemma of
trust facing some Siberian teenage girls and their parents] Youtube video
online @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trk-3XYXRsI

Professional
bio: Thor May has a core professional interest in cognitive
linguistics, at which he has rarely succeeded in making a living. He
has also, perhaps fatally in a career sense, cultivated an interest in
how things work – people, brains, systems, countries, machines,
whatever… In the world of daily employment he has mostly taught English
as a foreign language, a stimulating activity though rarely regarded as
a profession by the world at large. His PhD dissertation, Language
Tangle,
dealt with language teaching productivity. Thor has been teaching
English to non-native speakers, training teachers and lecturing
linguistics, since 1976. This work has taken him to seven countries in
Oceania and East Asia, mostly with tertiary students, but with a couple
of detours to teach secondary students and young children. He has
trained teachers in Australia, Fiji and South Korea. In an earlier
life, prior to becoming a teacher, he had a decade of finding his way
out of working class origins, through unskilled jobs in Australia, New
Zealand and finally England (after backpacking across Asia to England
in 1972).